“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do. There’s nothing illegal about it," said Giuliani.

"Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking [Ukraine] to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government."

From "Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump" (NYT).

What is Ukraine currently investigating that Giuliani wants to encourage? According to the NYT, it's "the origin of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election" and "the involvement of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s son in a gas company owned by a Ukrainian oligarch."

The investigations had been opened by Ukrainian prosecutors serving during the term of the country’s current president, Petro O. Poroshenko. He lost his re-election bid last month to Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian and political newcomer. Mr. Zelensky has said he would like to replace the prosecutor who oversaw some of the matters, Yuriy Lutsenko, who has met multiple times with Mr. Giuliani to discuss the issues...

Mr. Giuliani has been working on the effort with other allies of Mr. Trump whose involvement has not been previously reported, including Victoria Toensing, a lawyer who was named last year, along with her husband, as part of the legal team representing the president in the special counsel’s investigation. The appointment was rescinded less than one week later amid concerns about conflicts of interest, but Mr. Trump’s legal team suggested that Ms. Toensing and her husband, Joseph E. diGenova, would assist the president “in other legal matters.”

On social media and in regular appearances on Fox News, the couple advanced the theory that the special counsel’s investigation was the result of a Justice Department effort to frame Mr. Trump. They increasingly began pushing the claim that “the real collusion began in @Ukraine,” as Ms. Toensing put it in a post on Twitter in March.

The tweet spotlighted a story in the conservative media in which Mr. Lutsenko, Ukraine’s top prosecutor, announced he was opening an investigation into whether Ukrainian officials tried to help Mrs. Clinton during the 2016 presidential election by disseminating documents related to Mr. Manafort’s work in Ukraine before 2014.

Ms. Toensing has also met with Mr. Lutsenko, the Ukrainian prosecutor who has pushed the investigations, Mr. Giuliani said..... Ms. Toensing will accompany Mr. Giuliani to Ukraine....

"Many lawyers and top law firms want to represent me in the Russia case...don’t believe the Fake News narrative that it is hard to find a lawyer who wants to take this on."

"Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted. Problem is that a new...... ....lawyer or law firm will take months to get up to speed (if for no other reason than they can bill more), which is unfair to our great country - and I am very happy with my existing team. Besides, there was NO COLLUSION with Russia, except by Crooked Hillary and the Dems!"

Trump tweets this morning, here and here — as we're hearing the news (NYT) that Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing will not be joining Trump's special counsel legal team.

That one sentence — "Fame & fortune will NEVER be turned down by a lawyer, though some are conflicted" — makes it sound as though he knows he needs to take a legal position that challenges the limits of professional ethics! How is that smart? Whether it's true or not, why say that? Lawyers are just a bunch of money-grubbing fame-seekers! Why say that when he's going to need us to credit his lawyers? Is there some secret "genius" reason? Like... he's really casting aspersions on the lawyers who are out to get him, Mueller and company?

ADDED: I guess Trump wrote "some are conflicted" because, according to Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, quoted at the NYT link, they had "conflicts" that "prevent" them from "joining the president’s special counsel legal team." But why did he write "some [lawyers] are conflicted" instead of something more like "some lawyers have conflicts" or, better "some lawyers have conflicts of interest." To my ear, the locution to be conflicted connotes a struggle within the individual, drawn in 2 directions by competing concerns — such as, on one side, a desire for fame and money and on the other side ethical objections. The way Trump wrote, it sounds as though lawyers are feeling ambivalent about working for him, not that they have clients or business interests that present a conflict of interest.

Victoria Toensing thinks Patrick Fitzgerald should can the emotional theatrics.

It's not right for a prosecutor to express his outrage, she says:

... Justice Department guidelines [say] that prior to trial a "prosecutor shall refrain from making extrajudicial comments that pose a serious and imminent threat of heightening public condemnation of the accused." The prosecutor is permitted to "inform the public of the nature and extent" of the charges. In the vernacular of all of us who practice criminal law, that means the prosecutor may not go "beyond the four corners" -- the specific facts -- in the complaint or indictment...

Fitzgerald said what Blagojevich did "would make Lincoln roll over in his grave" and so forth. Clearly, inappropriate, according to Toensing, who seems to think Fitzgerald was emboldened by the adulation he received in the media over the way he treated Scooter Libby:

In his news conference in October 2005 announcing the indictment of Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice, he compared himself to an umpire who "gets sand thrown in his eyes." The umpire is "trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked" his view. With this statement, Mr. Fitzgerald made us all believe he could not find the person who leaked Valerie Plame's name as a CIA operative because of Mr. Libby. What we all now know is that Mr. Fitzgerald knew well before he ever started the investigation in January 2004 that Richard Armitage was the leaker and nothing Mr. Libby did or did not do threw sand in his eyes. In fact -- since there was no crime -- there was not even a game for the umpire to call.

In the Libby case, rather than suffer criticism, Mr. Fitzgerald became a media darling. And so in the Blagojevich case he returned to the microphone. Throughout the press conference about Gov. Blagojevich, Mr. Fitzgerald talked beyond the four corners of the complaint. He repeatedly characterized the conduct as "appalling." He opined that the governor "has taken us to a new low," while going on a "political corruption crime spree."

Let's get back to super-square prosecutors -- confined by the four corners.